


heartlines

by skittish



Category: B2ST, Beast (Band), Kpop - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-26
Updated: 2013-07-26
Packaged: 2017-12-21 09:39:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/898769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skittish/pseuds/skittish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>junhyung comes back from the army. hyunseung has trouble deciding whether he's the same man or not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	heartlines

**Author's Note:**

> sort of a scrapped piece.  
> i wrote the first 300 or so words in february sometime, and finished it on a whim in the last hour y.y
> 
> i don't know if this is what i originally intended, but this is what came of it!

hyunseung speaks more with his heart than he does with his tongue.

it isn't much of a language, really, no one can hear it but himself. but it's there, talking in syncopated beats, clustered together in various eighth, sixteenth notes and the like. he has to dance to keep up with them, the crescendo, the racing tempo– like he's chasing, running to catch his adrenaline and the butterflies birthed from it. he attempts to reel it in (to an _andante_ at least), but he's a hopeless case if he's ever seen one.

so when junhyung comes home for the first time in two years, he's so busy forcing his heart into long stretches of dotted whole notes and rests, he forgets to speak.

he smiles, contrived, and after a long, tense moment tells him that the floorboards creak in the middle of the night. he leaves out the part where he's gotten out of bed everytime just to check, to see if it was junhyung sneaking around the house in secret. how he convinced himself for an entire week that junhyung's never left– intended to, but hid himself away in shame of not following through. he'd never been so let down in his entire life.

junhyung grins a little at this (hyunseung thinks it's forced as well) and kisses him by his ear as he pushes by– "so i guess some things really don't change."

he doesn't understand it for a while, that sinking feeling in his gut even as his heart catches right in his throat.

 

junhyung is different these days, and he expects that– when it's his time to serve, he suspects he'll change too. he suspects he'll be the kind of person who can choose the words as he means them instead of struggling to convey those funny things in his stomach that, even after all this time, he still has no name for.

he suspects he'll be a better person.

(and if he's lucky, junhyung will love him all over again.)

 

it makes him nervous, the way he can't read him. it's unlike before, when he knew him as well as himself– could map out those long, tree branched lines on his palm better than he could his own. he's so perplexed in this discovery, this unwelcome realization that he doesn't see him staring back.

"hyunseung. what do you want to say?"

this confuses him, because he doesn't have anything to say- but he supposes there are many, many things that needs to be said. he just doesn't know what they are, even as they sit so unpleasantly in his throat.

instead of talking, he moves closer, grabs junhyung's hands and looks at them intently.

those lines are still there, the same as they've always been. his heart line is thick and straight, his life line similar. they're the same, and hyunseung isn't entirely sure what that means. quickly frustrated, junhyung pulls from him, exhaling a puff of disappointment. panicked, hyunseung blurts out a fraction of his thoughts in a bit of a frenzy– desperate for him not to leave.

"you're different but nothing about you has changed."

"... what?"

"you look the same. you smell the same; your hands are the same. you are the same. but you're different, still."

junhyung is thinking– he thinks he is. the look on his face indicates so, but hyunseung doesn't know if he can trust what he once knew, anymore. he studies him, looks at his brows that are knit– the knot that forms between them. he can see the restlessness in his face, the same weariness that greeted him days before. he thinks that maybe, he gets it now.

junhyung isn't any different. but inside, something has cracked– something has changed. and hyunseung isn't so naive to know what it might be.

 

but he isn't able to express this for several days.

junhyung has grown tired with him, weak in his resolve. but still, he's patient. because hyunseung will always be hyuynseung. and he knows as well as anyone that sometimes the dancer is an enigma even to himself. and that takes time to sort. so he gives him plenty of it.

it pays off when hyunseung comes to him at night, stands awkwardly at their doorframe and starts speaking, stammering like a troubled child.

he tells him how he waited; even about the creaks in the floorboard again, and how he hoped it was him. he tells him that he felt every second of his absence and he hated him for it. then he says that he hated himself for hating him, and that one day junhyung would hate him too. all for doing their duties as korean citizens and it isn't that which he hates– but the distance and the absence and all of the things not junhyung. 

 

he says all of this in ways that barely make sense, but enough for junhyung to beckon him forward, gather him in his arms just like hyunseung hates (because it makes him feel small, and he isn't), nearly suffocates him with his chest.

"j-jun–" hyunseung struggles, laughs weakly as he manages to pull away– replaces junhyung's coddling with a big kiss.

he's smiling now, the widest since his return from the army. and hyunseung thinks, a bit stupified, how he looks so much like himself again, and yet still like a new man altogether.

and then he _really_ gets it.

junhyung hasn't really changed. he has.

all that familiarity with himself left with junhyung; came back with him. he spent all this time adjusting not to a new junhyung, but to the old hyunseung.

smiling, really smiling now, junhyung shoves him with all of the force of his frustration and pulls him back with relief in the same movement. "finally." he says. "welcome back."


End file.
